It was in this spirit of Karen Blixen's classic book (and subsequent beautifully realised film) that I wanted to use the title "Out of Africa" for this suite for solo guitar. I'm a big fan of many of the different strands of African music-making, but was afraid of copying or appropriating African music in a sort of ethno-tourist way. This is not African music, but rather music which is inspired by my distilled memories of particular African styles of singing, for example, or the use of additive rhythms, irregular metric groupings and pentatonic or pandiatonic scales. I also try to pay homage to two great plucked-string instruments of the African continent: the kora (in mvt. 2) and the ud (mvt. 3). Needless to say, these pieces barely scratch the surface of the musical traditions and languages of Africa, but they do attempt to bring at least a bit of this rich heritage under the guitarist's fingers.

The suite consists of five different movements, which are played in two different groups without pause (movements 1-2 and movements 3-5). To give the different pieces a sense of unity and direction, I decided to programmatically chart the course of a day, from sunrise to sleep. The music's "day" begins with a "Call at Sunrise", which presents a melody in canon which gradually develops into a vibrant ostinato and vocalic melody.

The second movement, "Morning Dance", is again built on an ostinato bass line, and has an exuberance and feel typical of South African popular music. By using cross-string scalar patterns (in which notes ring over each other in what guitarists call campanella), I tried to evoke the sound of the kora. Though this instrument comes from a different part of Africa, the cross-breeding of different musical traditions is precisely what I was aiming for in this piece.

The heat of the day is depicted in "Zenith", which draws on North African/Arabic music in its central and final sections. Particularly in the middle section, the sound of the oud (arguably the guitar's great-great grandfather) is evoked, including microtonal inflections facilitated by de-tuning the guitar's third string. The final section builds to a climax via an exploration of the guitar as a percussion instrument. A transition then leads to the fourth movement, "Evening Dance", at the end of which a gradual transition is made to the final movement, "Cradle Song"--a lullaby which brings the day to a serene close, drawing on material from the first movement to create a cyclical return to the next morning.

Out of Africa for solo guitar  
              I. Call at Sunrise 
            II. Morning Dance
          III. Zenith 
           IV. Evening Dance 
             V. Cradle Song  


Duration:   ca. 21' 

First Performance: Alan Thomas, National Portrait 
                                             Gallery, London, 25th August 2006.
                                              (incomplete suite)

Score:    info@alanthomas-guitar.com

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"If I know a song of Africa, of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying onher back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me?" [Karen Blixen, Out of Africa]